The East-West Center (EWC) is at the forefront of educating people of the Asia Pacific region to meet the evolving demands of global change. Since its founding in 1960, the Center has promoted the development of a stable, prosperous, and peaceful Asia Pacific community through programs of cooperative study, training, and research.

The East-West Center’s AsiaPacificEd Program for Schools supports the Center’s mission by providing global learning and exchange opportunities for educators and students in the United States and in the Asia Pacific region.

The Asia Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership is a membership organization consisting of some twenty-five universities, ministries of education and quality assurance entities joined together to identify, explore and conduct research on key issues of higher education change within the Asia Pacific Region.

A joint program of the East-West Center and the University of Hawai’i, ASDP offers a variety of content-focused faculty and institutional development programs and activities centered around summer residential institutes, field seminars in Asia, workshops on the U.S. mainland, and an annual academic conference.

The East-West Center is a leader in educating people of the Asia Pacific region, including the United States, to meet the evolving demands and interdependency of global change. The Center offers a range of educational opportunities, bringing together more than 300 students each year from across the region.

The East-West Center Research Program engages the research and policy communities in the US and the Asia Pacific on issues of common concern. The goal is to provide more complete knowledge and deeper understanding of the environments, societies, economies, and governments of the Asia Pacific region.

The East-West Center is engaged in collaborative research projects in three broad areas: environment, population, and health; innovation, economic integration, and growth; and governance, security, and justice.

East-West Seminars offers short-term dialogue, field study, travel and exchange opportunities for working professionals in politics, government, civil society, business and the media who are in positions to affect policy, shape public opinion and influence change in their countries and communities. Programs provide opportunities for leading professionals from the United States and Asia Pacific to exchange views, build networks, develop leadership skills, and deepen knowledge of regional issues.

Journalism fellowships and exchanges for working American and Asia Pacific journalists promote understanding of the complexities of the Asia Pacific region through study tours. Intensive dialogue with colleagues, government officials, business executives and community leaders provides participants with a means to broaden their network of contacts.

The Asia Pacific Center for Journalists at the East-West Center in Honolulu leads the region in the vast array of programs and resources it offers journalists on Asia Pacific issues, including 10 fellowship travel programs for American, Asian and Pacific island journalists; a news service providing diverse commentary and analysis on breaking and ongoing Asia Pacific stories; comprehensive, updated online news coverage of the Pacific islands; and quick access to the East-West Center's specialists and 50,000 alumni throughout the region.

Pacific Islands Report is a nonprofit news publication of the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Offered as a free service to readers around the world, PIR provides an edited digest of news, commentary and analysis from across the Pacific region, Monday through Friday.

This June, the Polynesian voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a completes its three-year Mālama Honua Worldwide voyage to promote global sustainability. With its return, 32 years after it set sail from Hawai‘i on its first voyage, thoughts turn to the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and others who helped ignite the revival of traditional, non-instrument voyaging in the Pacific. After the founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawai‘i in the early 1970s, the East-West Center provided it support as part of the Center’s mandate from the US Congress to facilitate “cultural and technical interchange between East and West.” The Center, through its deep networks in the then-UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, was able to identify the traditional navigator necessary for the project, and host him in Honolulu as a “special fellow.”

Applications are being accepted now through May 1, 2017 for the East-West Center-Sasakawa USA Congressional Staff Program on Asia. CSPA is a bipartisan educational certificate program, which aims to equip Congressional staffers with greater knowledge of US-Asia policy in order to better understand America’s role in and engagement with this dynamic region and the policy implications that will directly engage Congress.

The East-West Center Association (EWCA) is an international network of professionals who have a past affiliation with the East-West Center. There are no membership fees to participate in the EWCA. The Association is led by an international Executive Board representing the various professions, regions, and decades of its members. Collectively, they are contributing to global understanding, building an Asia Pacific community, and making a world of difference.

The East-West Center Association (EWCA) is an international network of professionals who have a past affiliation with the East-West Center. There are no membership fees to participate in the EWCA. The Association is led by an international Executive Board representing the various professions, regions, and decades of its members. Collectively, they are contributing to global understanding, building an Asia Pacific community, and making a world of difference.

With more than 62,000 alumni and associates around the world, the East-West Center has one of the largest networks of professionals working to advance international cooperation and understanding between the East and West. As part of that network, you can receive advice and support from associates throughout the region. As an alumni/associate you may join any one of the nearly 50 EWC alumni chapters in Asia, the Pacific and the U.S. While traveling, you can also contact local chapters for assistance in making contacts with colleagues and friends.

The East-West Center seeks to build a strong, peaceful and vibrant Asia-Pacific community as an anchor of a global community which features China and the US as strong partners. Special Projects focuses on China-US philanthropy exchange and other leadership and education projects primarily associated with China. Major projects include the East-West Philanthropists Summit and the China-US Strategic Philanthropy Partnership (CUSP).

You are here

Brown Bag Seminar on "Locating the Peri-urban in the Age of the Planetary: Research Trajectories and Lessons from Manila’s Peri-urban Fringe" by Arnisson Andre C. Ortega

Brown Bag Seminar on "Locating the Peri-urban in the Age of the Planetary: Research Trajectories and Lessons from Manila’s Peri-urban Fringe" by Arnisson Andre C. Ortega

This is a listing of older East-West Center events (newer listed first). See Events to get the list of current or upcoming events.

Research Program Brown Bag Seminar

When: Jun 23 2016 - 12:00pm until Jun 23 2016 - 1:00pm

Where: John A. Burns Hall, Room 3012 (3rd Floor)

What:

Recently, urban scholars have alerted us to a planetary-wide urban condition that virtually taken hold in all landscapes, places and natures. In a globalized world of unfurling relations and hypermobility, epistemologies that tend to designate territories as either urban or rural are deemed obsolete, yet analyses based on city-centric methodologies can potentially obscure interrelationships among places. What is needed then are new approaches to interrogating the processes and relations that underpin the production of new spaces and emergent socio-spatial configurations. Given this planetary provocation, how do we then conceptualize and analyze peri-urban regions? This presentation argues that peri-urban regions must be conceptually reloaded as transgressive spaces illustrating contestations in urban transformations and as restless zones produced through mobilities and circuits of labor, goods, culture and raw materials. Drawing from the case of Manila, I show the multiple ways its peri-urban fringe is embedded in an interconnected web of inter-scalar relations that not only connect it with the urban core but also with other regions of the Philippines and overseas. For urban demography, the task at hand is to go beyond methodological city-ism and reconfigure territorialist renditions of space. I propose several methodological maneuvers as starting points for mixed methods approaches in peri-urban studies. First, territorial granularity that makes use of available small-area data can potentially unravel grounded processes of urban transformations, veering away from tendencies to use categories and instead focus on specific variables. Second, an accounting of mobilities of residents living peri-urban lives may unravel the multiple social, economic and cultural entanglements of peri-urbanization. I demonstrate these methodological approaches using initial findings from the University of the Philippines-based project, “Spaces in Transition: Mapping Manila’s Peri-Urban Fringe.”

Arnisson Andre Ortega is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Population Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an interdisciplinary geographer and critical demographer, with interests in urbanization, migration, GIS, counter-mapping, spatial statistics, and socio spatial theory. His research interrogates how neoliberal urbanism in the Philippines has facilitated a new round of property accumulation, the emergence of new middle class subjectivities, and the displacement of the poor. His recent projects have examined the rise of transnational suburbs and precarious suburbanisms in the Philippines and the role of alternative transnational economies in peri-urban developments.